Last Monday, Elizabeth Kolbert presented her talk, “Under a White Sky: Solar geoengineering and other bright ideas,” as a part of the Climate School Signature Speaker Series.

The “control of nature” has humanity seeking to bend the natural world to its will. From the manipulation of rivers to the capture of CO2, each forward innovation carries unintended consequences: reshaping the planet visibly and invisibly. 

On February 24, as a part of the Climate School Signature Speaker Series, Pulitzer Prize-winning and New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert presented her talk “Under a White Sky: Solar geoengineering and other bright ideas” at the Forum on the Columbia Manhattanville campus. To introduce her, Marco Tedesco, PhD, detailed her accomplishments, including her two-time National Magazine Award and Distinguished Professor Award for International Relations.

As the crowd erupted in applause, Kolbert took to the podium, slideshow clicker in hand. She began by reflecting on an inscription she saw at the University of Wyoming’s Engineering Hall, “Strike on, the control of nature is won not given.” Constructed in the 1920s with proceeds from oil found on the campus, this message, Kolbert suggests, would be found inspirational. Humanity had “faith in the future” they were creating for themselves. The idea that “nature could and should be harnessed for human ends” was at the “heart of what it meant to be an Engineer,” Kolbert said. 

Kolbert traced this confidence in controlling nature to the 1920 invention of the Wood Screw Pump, which was used to drain the swampy marshlands around New Orleans and create new neighborhoods. At the time, the New Orleans Item celebrated this achievement, quoting, “Man is every day surpassing nature.”

However, Kolbert believes that in the century since, “the phrase ‘control of nature’ has taken on much more baggage.” The “triumphalist” phrase took a different meaning when used by Rachel Carson in her 1962 book Silent Spring. The optimism of the early 20th century transitioned to the environmental crises of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, where invisible radioactive fallout transformed teeth, and pesticides killed fish, birds, and, occasionally, humans. Carson warned, “The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.”

John McPhee, a journalist and environmental writer, saw the University of Wyoming inscription and borrowed the phrase for his 1989 book Control of Nature. However, unlike Carson’s “worried and anguished” tone, McPhee was “skeptical, even bemused.”  McPhee explored the story of a volcanic eruption on the island of Heimaey, Iceland, wherein Icelanders attempted to hose down a volcano. While the island’s port was saved, Kolbert quotes McPhee saying, “the truth of all of this…will never be known, the role of luck being unassessable.” 

In the final chapter of her book Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, Kolbert addressed geoengineering and its appeals and hazards. She jokes that if “McPhee hadn’t already used it, [she] would have called the book The Control of Nature.” 

Now, Kolbert argued, “the issue is not so much the human effort to control nature…the key thing is that without even seeking to, we do control nature, or at least we dominate it.”

Kolbert then presented key statistics illustrating humanity’s vast impact on the environment. While she admitted that the room–full of scientists, academics, students, and community members–would be familiar with some of the statistics, some facts could be surprising. Humans have now directly transformed more than half of the ice-free land on Earth. They have also transformed roughly half of the remaining land indirectly through oil pipelines. Humans routinely cause earthquakes, and humans outweigh wild mammals nine to one, according to a paper from a few years ago. With mammalian livestock, the ratio is 24 to one. As she clicked from slide to slide, Kolbert presented a new fact, each detailing humans’ weight over nature: how plastic waste outweighs fish in the ocean and how CO2 is building in the atmosphere.

Finally, Kolbert settled on the graph detailing CO2 levels since the 1800s. While she knows the logical response is to agree to change the trend lines or scale back, she also knows that is not what is happening.

“Only now, what we’re striving to control is not a nature that exists or is imagined to exist apart from the human. Instead, a new effort begins with a prime, remade, and spirals back on itself,” Kolbert said. “What we are attempting to control is a nature that we ourselves can help bring into being.”

Thus, her book Under a White Sky attempts to navigate this attempt and explain it to non-experts. Kolbert approached the book as a journalist who presents a series of stories, not as an argument. 

In her first story, she recounted the history of the Chicago River. The Chicago River, once “so thick with filth that a chicken could walk across it without getting its feet wet,” now holds a part of the river known as Bubbling Creek, where methane still bubbles up. To address the polluted water, the city decided to reverse the flow of the Chicago River, allowing cleaner water to flow through once again. However, this came at a cost: the construction of the canal connected the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River, allowing aquatic species to migrate between them. Further, due to some species the US imported as a form of biological control, a new invasive species dominated the waterways and still does to this day.

Next, Kolbert spoke about New Orleans, at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Since the first French settlement in 1718, the city has experienced a cycle of flooding, rebuilding, and flooding again. Each innovation has been quickly washed away, with the most recent example being the failure of the levees during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Despite billions of dollars spent to upgrade levees and seawalls since then, New Orleans continues to sink at an alarming rate, exacerbating the challenge of maintaining these protective structures. The city’s natural landscape, once shaped by the river’s flooding, has been altered because the river no longer replenishes the land with sediment. In response, engineers are now turning to sediment diversions—massive gates that would release sediment into the surrounding wetlands, hoping to rebuild some of the land lost to subsidence. However, this three billion-dollar project faces contention, especially from local fishermen who believe it will alter the local fishing spots.

Then, Kolbert led the audience to Iceland, wherein she described Climeworks, a company that developed a system to capture CO2 from the air and convert it into chalk, creating a form of negative emissions. While this company has found great success, Kolbert reminded us that “to remove CO2 on the scale that’s necessary to alter our trajectory [towards decreasing emissions] requires an infrastructure on the scale of the fossil fuel industry.”

Finally, Kolbert directed the audience’s gaze toward the sun. Geoengineering, a form of engineering focused on large-scale changes to the Earth to address climate change, is considered by Kolbert “our ultimate fix.” She introduced the concept that by flying an aircraft just above the ozone layer, we could spray the Earth with a reflective particle to direct less sunlight to the Earth, thus creating a cooling effect. But Kolbert stated the “possible side effects are manifold,” including changes in regional weather patterns, damage to the ozone layer, and changes to the color of the sky.

She asked the audience to consider which world is better: our fossil-fueled world or a similar world but with an altered atmosphere? Kolbert said, “Massive engineering projects have to be assessed against the alternative.”

In the Q&A following Kolbert’s talk, students and experts raised several questions regarding the future of geoengineering. Whereas solar engineering presents many potential problems, especially in terms of unintentional and intentional consequences, the likelihood of geoengineering being utilized is questionable. Kolbert wondered, “If you have a world that can’t agree on the basics…then how are you going to get that world to sort of agree on geoengineering?” 

Another individual pointed out Kolbert’s pessimism regarding the subject matter and her motivation to continue writing. Kolbert responded, “I think if you’re not pessimistic right now, you’re delusional.” Nonetheless, “planet Earth is really interesting, and what we’re doing is really interesting.” 

An environmental engineer in the crowd asked Kolbert her solution. She responded, “I don’t know.” As a journalist, she chronicles the information, but she doesn’t solve it.  

Following the Q&A, a small reception was held outside the Forum where Kolbert offered her advice and insight to a crowd of individuals.

In the final moments of her talk, Kolbert left the audience with a sobering thought: “With great power comes great responsibility, as Spiderman tells us. But so far, we have not exercised much in the way of responsibility. We’ve acted as if there are no limits and as if new technologies will always come along to our rescue,” she said. “I wish I had more confidence that they actually will.”

Signature Speaker Series via Author